Kosher Bagel Rules

[tongodeon]

Today for breakfast matrushkaka, her dad, and I went to House of Bagels in the Richmond. While waiting for my whitefish and onion I overheard the store clerk explain that their bagels were kosher style, but not technicaly kosher. Being a fan of complicated religious rules I asked what the difference was

Comments

[xiphias]

If you didn't have a certifying body, then anybody could claim their things were kosher. There'd be no oversight, and, when you have no independent overseeing body, you get rampant fraud

[tongodeon]

If you didn't have a certifying body, then anybody could claim their things were kosher.

If you didn't have a certifying body, then anybody could claim their things were vegetarian/vegan. And without supervision it's possible for food that's not vegan to be claimed to be vegan, and I'm sure that actually does happen. And yet the hummus matrushkaka makes at home is still vegan, even if there isn't a vegan around to supervise its preparation, and even if meat is sometimes served at our house.

sealed, packaged foods are basically safe once they're sealed and packaged. The Lender's Bagels plant cannot operate on Saturday.

I'm trying to come up with a hack. Maybe you cook bagels every day except Saturday, and sell sealed/packaged day-olds on that day.

[xiphias]

Correct. The supervision doesn't make things kosher. The supervision allows people to claim with a degree of believability that their things are kosher

[tongodeon]

Correct. The supervision doesn't make things kosher. The supervision allows people to claim with a degree of believability that their things are kosher.

If I had a coop in my yard, and raised a couple chickens, and had my mother's friend Danny Sime teach me how to do kosher slaughter, and killed a chicken in the kosher manner, and drained the blood and salted the meat in the prescribed manner, then that chicken would be kosher, even if nobody else around certified it. And if I made that chicken into soup, that soup would be kosher.

This makes sense, but seems to contradict what I was told at the bagel shop. They seemed to imply that even if they did everything by the kosher rules, because there isn't a rabbi there to supervise/certify/bless the food that means it's not kosher.

[xiphias]

Yup. That's because folks generally don't know how this stuff works. It probaby DOES contradict what you were told -- because they were probably wrong. Because they don't have to know how it works. Even if it HAD been a kosher shop, rather than a kosher-style shop, they wouldn't have had to know more than "I do this, and I don't do that", rather than knowing WHY.

This stuff's complicated, and that is yet ANOTHER reason that restaurants fob it off to specialists instead of trying to figure it out themselves.

[crisper]

Well, without a rabbi there to supervise and certify, I don't think they can tell the public (the public that actually cares) that they are kosher, they can't claim to the public (the public that actually cares) that the food is kosher, so it effectively is not.